Saturday, November 9, 2013

Seat Rails

Originally, the plan was to have the seats fixed in place, however it quickly became apparent that there was no easy way to mount the seats this way. I'd originally put bars across and bolted into the bottom of the seats from under the car but this made for a very difficult process adding & removing the seat as required. I'd also only mounted the driver's seat with the passenger seat just simply sitting in the car as a form of storage.

It was time to change all that. I still had the original mounts that the seats came on (from a Falcon) so we looked at using these. The first thing we noticed was that the Falcon mounts had the seats wayyy too high for the car, with a helmet on and the seat reasonably upright (to prevent whiplash in event of a rear end collision on the track) there was no room for a tall-ish passenger or driver with a helmet on, not ideal. The mounts we'd temporarily installed were too low, I decided by testing a few different things that the seat needed to be about an inch higher, so we worked using the bars the seat had been sitting on and cut down the original falcon rails feet.

These feet were then re-attached to the rails at a more suitable height. The passenger seat will still be lower and most likely further back than the drivers seat, this is for a few reasons - one is that the wiring for the car is in the passenger footwell and I don't want it getting kicked out; the other is that it should allow for a little more elbow room for both driver and passenger.

These holes were then drilled and bolts with large (strut top) washers installed underneath.

The passenger seat rails are also ready to be installed but this has not yet been done.

I also cut together some video covering what we've done in the last few days - included is some footage of the seat travel with Shaun (who is 6'4" tall) demonstrating the seating position: